Single Image Human Proxemics Estimation for Visual Social Distancing

Maya Aghaei, Matteo Bustreo, Yiming Wang, Gianluca Bailo, Pietro Morerio, Alessio Del Bue; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2021, pp. 2785-2795

In this work, we address the problem of estimating the so-called "Social Distancing" given a single uncalibrated image in unconstrained scenarios. Our approach proposes a semi-automatic solution to approximate the homography matrix between the scene ground and image plane. With the estimated homography, we then leverage an off-the-shelf pose detector to detect body poses on the image and to reason upon their inter-personal distances using the length of their body-parts. Inter-personal distances are further locally inspected to detect possible violations of the social distancing rules. We validate our proposed method quantitatively and qualitatively against baselines on public domain datasets for which we provided groundtruth on inter-personal distances. Besides, we demonstrate the application of our method deployed in a real testing scenario where statistics on the inter-personal distances are currently used to improve the safety in a critical environment.